Thursday, April 7, 2016

Sometimes there something to be said for classics and the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 1981 line up is kinda hard to beat. Classic modules,adventures, monster books, and expansions mark this era of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons; it happens to be one of my favorites.

Lately I've been having to work quite a few hours and handling repair work has been especially heavy today(this is a good thing folks). But the other day I grabbed my AD&D 1st edition books and began to fall in love with Advanced Dungeons and Dragons all over again.This came about after reading through the 1981 Dungeon Hobby shop catalog. There are times when you need to get back to your roots and nothing does this for me like Advanced Dungeons and Dragons first edition. You begin to look into your collection of books a gamer and start thinking about being with friends around a table to chuck some dice. At least that's how it works for me and its an interesting mental exercise to revisit the classics.

As a gamer I've thought long & hard about the passion, the amazing history that AD&D has, and what it means to me. It really doesn't take much to get my gamer juices flowing, the opening to the damn D&D cartoon, hearing someone in a store or gas station mention the game, the sight of a hobby or comic shop along some stretch of highway, a book shop in some small town or mall or the sight of this catalog. Yeah this was pretty much my secondary gateway drug into the hobby back in the day.

And if you look at some of the details it has the set up for the game perfectly outlined right in the catalog; the basic, expert, expert adventures, and the complete run of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons books all laid out right there for the the DM.

All of this product was laid out back to back so that the DM could purchase and use it with a steady progression and not have any problems. This same catalog also featured original Dungeons and Dragons as a collectors item as it was being phased out but that would take a while. Eighty one was a very good year for Dungeons and Dragons.If your interested in the catalog then hop over to here.

My point here isn't simply nostalgia but the over all plan that this line seemed to have; sure we now know some of the upheaval and whatnot that went on behind the scenes but simply thumbing through that catalog from Eighty one and its like falling in love with the game again. Taken as a whole this catalog kinda maps out a whole range of a campaign especially when combined with other classic era TSR games such as Gamma World and Boot Hill which actually work quite nicely with the system and really expand the range of this wonderful line of books. So good were these products that all this time later and their still being used at the table along with their emulators.

This is simply a random post extoling my love for this era of the grand old game this evening.

About Me

My name is Eric I started gaming with Dungeons & Dragons white box back in 1977 & haven't looked back. I'm a crafter, sewer, sewing machine repair man who also happens to be a Dungeon Master. Thanks for taking the time to read this.